Ethics of Care and methodological reflections of reuniting refugee families in Brazil

Abstract

Ethical discussions have become key to Refugee Studies. Ethical guidelines on refugee research provide indications on how to conduct ethical research including the principle of doing no-harm. However, it is important to understand how ethics happens in practice (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004) before going to the field, during and after. This paper discusses my experience of “ethics of care in practice” through the process of conducting phenomenological interviews with 20 refugees in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, in 2018.  My research adopts the four pillars of care ethics (attentiveness, responsibility, responsiveness, and competence) (White and Tronto, 2004) as a practice that contributes to beyond “doing no-harm” (Mackenzie, McDowell & Pittaway, 2007) in refugee research. My reflection contributes to this literature on “ethics in practice” and refugee studies (Muller-Funk, 2021) and provides a practical reflection on the ethics of care on research involving South-South refugees in a Latin American country.